Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong spent 22½ hours in Beijing last week. This is remarkable given that Australia has fallen out of favor with the Chinese government in recent years. Canberra became persona non grata. Or as a Chinese official once said, “China is angry.” And, “If you make China an enemy, China will be the enemy.”
Australia had made an enemy of China – the country’s largest trading partner – with several actions: In 2018 the country excluded the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei from expanding the 5G network. Subsequently, several Chinese investment projects in Australia were rejected.
Australia withdrew from the so-called “Belt and Road” initiative, a project through which China is investing in infrastructure projects worth billions around the world. Canberra warned of Chinese human rights violations, for example against the Uyghur minority. Above all, Australia’s call for an international investigation into the origins of Covid-19 heralded a diplomatic ice age.
Beijing then made an example of Australia: the Chinese government imposed massive punitive tariffs on Australian wines and high tariffs for barley. The latter prompted the Australians to file a complaint with the World Trade Organization. Coal imports were blocked and trade barriers made it difficult for Australian cotton, beef and lobster producers to do business.
Australian journalist Cheng Lei was arrested in August 2020, and writer and democracy activist Yang Hengjun was officially charged a few months later after spending almost two years in prison. For a long time, the relationship was so strained that even calls and letters from Canberra were systematically blocked by Beijing.
As a result, Australia leaned more and more towards the USA. In the meantime, Canberra seemed to have given up the previous balancing act between Beijing and Washington. Under the previous government under Scott Morrison, the country signed the so-called AUKUS Security Agreement together with Great Britain and the USA. As part of this partnership, Australia is to receive nuclear submarines and cooperate in the development of hypersonic missiles. They also want to work more closely with Japan on security issues in the future. All of this sent a clear signal to Beijing.
In spite of this, or perhaps because of this, the Chinese government attempted a rapprochement again. “China has been trying to resolve its bilateral dispute with Australia for about a year,” said Benjamin Herscovitch, a China expert at Australia’s National University in Canberra.
It was helpful that the parliamentary elections in May brought about a change of government. Even then there were congratulations from Beijing. At the G20 summit in Bali, China’s President Xi Jinping then spent 30 minutes with Australia’s new Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
And with Foreign Minister Penny Wong, an Australian member of the government was a guest in Beijing for the first time in three years. “The ice is melting, albeit slowly,” Wong commented on her meeting with Foreign Minister Wang Yi, which took place on a symbolic date – the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries.
The fact that the Chinese government wants to normalize diplomatic contacts at a high level should “rightly be viewed as a victory by the Australian government,” said Herscovitch. Elena Collinson of the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology in Sydney also concludes that China has recognized that its “wolf warrior” diplomacy has only yielded “mixed results”.
The country has suffered a major setback, bolstering the resolve of several nations in the face of its bullying behavior. Still, Collinson doubts that China will cast aside this “diplomatic philosophy” entirely – one has only to continue reading the daily remarks of the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, look at Wang Yi’s appointment to the Politburo, or look at President Xi Jinping’s recent public duping of the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau at the G-20 Summit in Bali. Nevertheless, it is clear that Beijing is striving for better relations, at least with a number of countries.
Australia appears to be one of those beneficiaries, according to Herscovitch. On the one hand, this is probably due to China’s urge to catch up economically after the pandemic years and to continue to have access to natural resources. On the other hand, according to Collinson, it also helped that Australia’s new Labor government brought “more consistency, clarity and calm to the rhetoric”.
China’s pressure hasn’t really yielded to Australia – Canberra’s political positions remain unchanged. But the new Labor government “may have refrained from targeted sanctions against Chinese officials to avoid angering Beijing and to achieve this improvement in bilateral relations,” Herscovitch said. For example, the Australian government recently sanctioned a number of Iranians and Russians. However, Chinese officials who have been sanctioned by other countries for serious human rights violations in Xinjiang have not been affected by these sanctions.
According to a commentator in the Sydney Morning Herald, Canberra is pursuing a “clear dual strategy”. Short-term diplomacy is paired with long-term military deterrence. While Secretary of State Penny Wong is working to restore a productive diplomatic relationship with Beijing, Secretary of Defense Richard Marles is rebuilding Australia’s defense force and preparing the country for a possible military conflict with China.
Last but not least, Wong’s visit to Beijing showed that the Australians remain suspicious of the Chinese. Despite the freezing cold, the crew slept overnight on board the Australian government jet. They wanted to ensure that the plane could not be tampered with in any way, as revealed by one of the journalists from the Sydney Morning Herald who was traveling with them. The editors themselves were also all given new telephones, telephone numbers and laptops, which were disposed of at the end of the trip.
